Archbishop of Sydney

Fifth Sunday of Lent

St. Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney
Is 43:16-21; Phil 3:8-14; Jn 8:1-11

By + Cardinal George Pell
Archbishop of Sydney
25/3/2007

The response to the psalm today, which we have just sung, is that “the Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy”.  Sometimes we need faith to see the bright side of things through the gloom and we need to be adults (at least in outlook, and some young people truly are like this), moving away from self-centredness to avoid taking our blessings for granted.

Isaiah beautifully and poetically invokes the Jewish escape from Egypt as evidence of God’s love for his people and his powerful support for them.  God is making roads in the wilderness, putting water in the desert, so that even the jackals and ostriches, all the wild beasts will honour Him.

Paul develops this argument by identifying “Christ Jesus Our Lord” as the agent through whom the one true God is now working and by whom the people of God are taught and led.  And in today’s gospel we see and hear Christ at work in a messy and difficult human situation, surrounded by enemies determined to damage or destroy his credibility.

Paul claims that it is supremely advantageous to know and accept that the most important truths about this life and the next are revealed by Jesus.  He does not claim that this knowledge by itself is enough, because he has to keep running, straining ahead for what is still to come, racing for the finish for the prizes which Jesus Christ has won for us.  In today’s gospel we heard of one example of what this meant in practice.

Here we have some of the most beautiful verses in the whole of Christ’s teaching; a delicate and wonderful balance between right principle and mercy.  Sometimes people presume that the New Testament was written by Christ, as the Epistles were written by Paul.  That is not the case.  The Gospels were not written by Our Lord.  The New Testament is certainly inspired by the Holy Spirit, but it is a product of authors from the first communities.  And then the first communities had to decide which books were inspired by the Holy Spirit in a special way, as distinct from being very good writings and worthy of consideration.  That process went on for hundreds of years and there were often significant differences about the merits of particular books.  These particular verses in chapter 8 of St. John were particularly contentious and for hundreds of years, up to nine hundred years in the Eastern parts of the Church, they refused to include these verses in their version of St. John.  However in the Western world St. Ambrose, St. Augustine and St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin (Vulgate), all accepted these verses.

Nearly always God writes straight in crooked lines and he was doing that with the authors of the Scriptures and as the Church decided just what made up the New Testament.  The scene described is a world away from most of our daily life in Australia; we have here ugly mob violence, or the threat of it.  The Jewish authorities had lost the power of life and death, which needed Roman approval and sometimes people were tempted to take the law into their own hands.  Also the Jewish laws against adultery were terribly fierce and extremely lopsided; it was only the woman who was punished and the woman who could be condemned to death.  So a group of Pharisees brought this woman before Our Lord claiming she has been caught in the act of adultery and the Jewish law says that a woman committing adultery should be stoned to death.

As the Scriptures tell us, this was a test and a trap for Jesus.  If he let the woman off they would say “you are not keeping the Law of Moses”.  If he said the woman should be stoned to death they would say “what a heartless brute you are”.  Our Lord, as on so many other occasions, was well up to dealing with his opponents.  “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” he said as he started to write in the dust.  This is the only direct evidence we have that Our Lord could write, because he left no writings.  We certainly know that he could read, we hear of him reading in the local synagogue.  Unfortunately in this incident we do not know what he wrote or drew.  One by one, starting with the oldest, the men who were threatening to stone this woman left.  The most plausible tradition is that somehow by writing in the dust Our Lord was able to suggest to these men one by one their own secret, hidden sins.

Then they were all gone and there was only Our Lord and the woman and he said to her, “they seem to have disappeared, they have all gone”.  She agreed that nobody had condemned her, “I am not going to condemn you either” Jesus explained.  That is a central point, the love of God at work.  Then he went on.  He did not pat her on the back and say “look, you are doing a good job, keep up the good work.  As your conscience is clear just keep on sinning”.  No, he said to her, “I am not going to condemn you, but I say to you go and sin no more”.

St. Augustine writing about this in Latin was able to capture it in these beautiful little short phrases, which we have to struggle to translate briefly into English.  He said, ‘Relicti sunt duo misera et misericordia’.  So, two things remained the mercy of God and this miserable wretched woman who had come so close to losing her life.

Let us pray then this morning that the person and the teachings of Christ will be central to our lives, because it is the Son of God who is teaching us, not any range of bishops or even popes or saints or good people; it is the Son of God who is teaching us and compassion does not mean that anything goes.  Compassion means a call to repentance and belief and above all to a deep faith in the overwhelming mercy and forgiveness of God.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.